On the Simulation of the Principle of Political Reality

Repeating Baudrillard from Watergate to Trump

[Note: This is an essay originally written in late September 2018. It has been rehashed for the blog here].

Introduction: Political Realism or the Void at Center of Politics?

On September 5th of 2018, an anonymous piece was published in The New York Times titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”. This piece is one of the latest publications in a long list of commentaries on the scandals surrounding the administration of President Donald Trump — one would hope that to have said these sentences, these would come with an air of unreality, and yet the scandalous state of leadership in the United State nevertheless seeks to assert some form of political realism. In the case of this anonymous piece — which echoes the whole of denunciations surrounding Trump — we find a group of folk within the White House Administration claiming to be an internal resistance quarantine the state of democracy under Trump. The writer explicitly expresses that their resistance is towards Trump himself, not so much towards the systematic circumstances that his uncanny presence is symptomatic of — one may quote: “ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous” (anon). In other words, in facing the inconsistency at the heart of United States’ politics through Trump, these administrative folks expressly attempt to cover over this absent center to the political gravity of its state — the resistance at the White House is only regenerative of faith in the system and the legitimacy of their status.

It is in these terms that we may draw a comparison over this current state of affairs and Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of the scandal effect in Watergate in his book Simulations. Baudrillard argues that the scandal effect conceals that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (Simulations, 26–27) — as in the case of the anonymous piece on Trump, the difference they are setting to do in their resistance might as well be the same, for in acting as if reality is in crisis one is sustaining the status of that reality as real nevertheless. What Baudrillard notes of scandal pieces such as “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” that they nevertheless seek the regeneration of a moral and political principle, as in the imaginary, one is regenerating reality in the form of its distress (Simulation, 27) In short, pieces like this one act as if politics before Trump were legitimate in their reality. For instance, during the infamous occasion of the separation of immigrant children from their parents, Trump was the gravitational center of the political affect of disdain. However, one may note that the practice also dates back to the Obama Administration — this is not to exempt Trump through possible deniability, but rather to point out that centering on Trump is a mere displacement of a more complicated problem. Namely that when a reality T.V. star is at the end of capitalist democracy, the political unreality at the center of the political model tries to regenerate itself as if the fault is not in the model and its exceeding excesses — in the face of the simulation of political normalcy and in acting as if foundational social contracts bind the political corpus together, by a reading of Baudrillard we will seek to understand the mechanisms behind the regeneration of political normality as those in The New York Times piece.

Despite All Scandalous Discourse, There is no Scandal…

As Baudrillard notes, “the denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law” (Simulations, 27) — we may turn back to The New York Times piece to note that its treatment of the Trump scandal seeks to rehabilitate the state of normalcy in United States democracy. For instance, when we paint an idealized imagine of what the political arena of the United States, more often than not we picture Democrats versus Republicans — in trying to return to a state of normalcy through some political nostalgia, the anonymous writer of the piece (hereby referred to as “anon”) tries to re-establish the Republican Party as a legitimate political institution, as one may quote that:

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright (anon).

Despite the political nostalgia expressed here, one may nevertheless note that the ideal integrity of the Republican Party has been nothing but ideal — this is especially the case as many involved Republicans have lost such integrity in trying to normalize Trump into their given modus operandi. For instance, in the case of town hall meetings, Republican representatives have tried to justify the normality of Trump and their political realism to their dissatisfied constituents — as noted in a Vox article, since then these representatives have essentially stopped hosting these meetings or completely blown off those to whom they are accountable (“Republicans don’t hold town halls anymore”). And yet, anon’s piece can act as if there are legitimate processes and systems that need to be preserved and saved — in this regard, we may state this resembles Baudrillard’s commentary on Watergate insofar as it “above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal” (Simulations, 27). The same may be said about the Trump administration, as since day one it was seen as scandalous, as a break from normalcy and always in reference to some political reality principle grounding political hallucinations. Therefore, in the mise en scene of the Trump scandal, we may argue that anon only furthers the order of capital through a moralistic stance — however, Trump’s amorality is no different from anon’s moralism insofar as both sustain the same capitalist realism as the end-horizon of their political imagination.

The moralism behind anonr is also not much different that Colin Kaepernick’s moralism insofar as both reestablish capitalist realism at the limit of their political imagination. To elaborate, Colin Kaepernick was an NFL player whose activist activities with Black Lives Matter drew fire around the time that Donald Trump started being in office. Eventually, Kaepernick’s civil disobedience was met with his dismissal from the NFL. Just around the same time that The New York Times published the piece, Colin Kaepernick came out with Nike for their newest “Just Do It!” campaign. Of course, the immediate public criticism of Kaepernick noted that Nike is a corporation known for their exploitative labour practices — both Kaepernick and anon conceal the primal mise en scene of capital through a superficial moral panic. According to Baudrillard, this obscures capital’s “instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality — this is what is scandalous” (Simulations, 28–29). Kaepernick’s Nike campaign was released with the following tweet: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything”(Twitter tweet). One may take on a perverse jab at the meaning of this tweet by pointing out that both Kaepernick and anon believe in capitalist political realism so much so that they are willing to sacrifice everything for it — just the same way that the principle “the freer the market, the free the people” believes in itself so much so that its ecologically destructive economic practice are willing to sacrifice the world for the beliefs sustaining them. The differences that Kaepernick and anon are trying to accomplish are not much different than a 2% cafe latte as opposed to a skimmed milk one — in other words, a minor variation on the same thing.

Baudrillard notes that in cases such as Kaepernick’s and anon’s, they act “as if capital were linked by contract to the society it rules” (Simulations, 29) — in the state of these types of capitalist realisms, society cannot be imagined besides the rule of capital, and yet capitalism has never been the centralizing rule and order of society. Instead, Baudrillard stresses that capital is a challenge to society (Simulations, 29–30). Capitalism is unprincipled and in no way does it rule society other than in creating perceived necessities such as commodities — if capitalism were principled or ruly, its form of production would not strain social cohesion; in other words, capitalism would not have to pretend to be cohesive of society if it were not already partaking in the dissolution of the social. However, this comment, according to Baudrillard, also does little difference for:

All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none (Simulations, 28).

In other words, ruling capital is identical to the mere unruliness of capital to the extent that capital continues to be the challenge of society. This problem echoes some of the comments by anon — one which shows that the Trump scandal is not really a scandal in the big picture — for in deliberations over invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president, the author noted that “no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis” (anon). In this context, it is curious to note what the author behind anon considers to have been successes to its administration: “There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more” (anon). Indeed, it is not such a severe crises if the United States keeps a strong military, am I right?

The Childishness of Politics — Disneyland and Trump

As we turn over our attention to Disneyland, we may note that anon’s piece made a pretty curious and funny comment: “It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room” — the first thing to note is that given what this author thinks are political achievements and should be a source of comfort, nevertheless amounts to the same in the credibility of a given notion over political reality. Meaning that this amounts to a disgruntled sigh at the anticipated revival of political perpetuity. The genre of scandal pieces during the Trump era operate akin to what Baudrillard calls ““imaginary stations” which feed reality, reality-energy” (Simulations, 26) — we make our daily pitstop on social media and news outlets to see the perpetual crisis of Trump, and those who get off at criticism over the Trump administration get their grounding dose of reality as to deter any sense of political unreality or anti-realism.

The reality-sustaining “as if” behind anon’s piece provides us with a key aspect to Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and why Disneyland matters in this context of “adults in the White House”. First of, the “as if” of the political realism that the author seeks to guard entails the simulation of that very political realism — the “as if” has a concealing function to the derealization of the political in the face of its contingent constitution. For instance, we may reconsider capital — in having no contractual or foundational regard for the cohesion of the social, capital is a challenge to society in that in its auto-regenerative processes it manifests its own contingency. In this case that the contracts and constitutions of the socio-political amount to Disneyland. Baudrillard notes that the central function to Disneyland is “to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere” (Simulations, 25). And is this not exactly what anon is asking us to ignore and look past? Both the contractual constitutions of capitalist political realism and Disneyland come in the presentation of an “imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real” (Simulations, 25). The hyperrealistic success of the simulation of capitalist political realism lays in its attempt to conceal “the fact that the real is no longer real, thus saving the reality principle” (Simulations, 25).

It is important to understand how we arrived here by turning to the successive phases of the image where simulations progressive undermines representation and the attempt at reference. The image:

• It is the reflection of a basic reality
• It masks and perverts a basic reality
• It masks the absence of a basic reality
• It bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (Simulations, 11)

Whereas at first the representation sought to place basic reality, in arriving to deep pure simulation we find ourselves in the placelessness of the principle of equivalence whence the simulation is “exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (Simulations, 11). In other words, the reason why capitalist realism bares no clear horizon of its end and why it perpetuates itself through auto-regeneration is because Capital is nowhere even though it is everywhere — the turn from the real to the hyperreal in capitalism can be elaborated by the turn from “the liquidation of referentials” to “their artificial resurrection in systems of signs… substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (Simulations, 4). The problem is much deeper if we dwell on the question of how to cure ourselves from simulations — as any encounter with a hypochondriac may pose a medical challenge in treating simulations, for medicine can only deal with “true” illnesses, not those produced by simulations. The psychoanalytic response to the problem is to turn the truth of symptom from the organic to the unconscious order; however, Baudrillard argues that the work of the unconscious may be “produced” the same way dreams already are. In fact, the deeper problem with simulations is that one gets to a point where one cannot tell the difference (Simulations, 5)

One such slippery symptom may be those of collusion with elections — as in the case of the Trump Administration, and, as we will see later, also in Nathan Fielder’s explication of voter fraud. Indeed, collusion and manipulation come into the scene as a “floating causality” where “by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political reality may can be saved” (Simulations, 30–31). Anon, again, simulates a conventional and restrictive field that grants them political credibility — this is again reflected by their refusal to invoke the 25th Amendment and face the state of constitutional crisis. It is not surprising that it sprinkles “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more” to make their political realism seem to have palpability (anon).

The simulation is besides facts and reason, and Baudrillard particularly characterizes it by the precession of the model. If we think of recent examples such as InfoWars’ Alex Jones claiming that the Sandy Hook Shooting was a hoax or the prevalence of the term Fake News in geopolitical discourse, or use Baudrillard’s where we consider all narratives accounts of any act or event “in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exists, in a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates” (Simulations, 31). It is all the same. All is equally true whereby the objectivity of the fact cannot keep up with the vertigo of interpretation (Simulations, 31). We face the precession of the model when facts no longer have their own trajectory, but rather they are appropriated under given models — an activity that can be taken up by many different models. Let us suppose that we sent some person who has lived under a rock for most of their life into a room full of people with the purpose of determining which one is has the factual truth to a question concerning current affairs — however, we also note to this person that most of the people in the room are conspiracy theorists, so even if they all have received this factual truth, it would be narrated according to however it acts as the last piece to the puzzle, or as if it patches the inconsistency of the precessional model. Though earlier on Baudrillard used the precession of simulacra in the expression “the map before the territory” (Simulation, 2), Baudrillard that:

This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model… is what each time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory — all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle (Simulations, 32).

In this sense, when we consider Baudrillard’s famous desert of the real, Baudrillard notes that:

It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary, proving truth by scandal, proving the law by transgression, proving work by the strike, proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution, as for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object… proving theatre by anti-theatre… art by anti-art… pedagogy by anti-pedagogy… psychiatry by anti-psychiatry… (Simulations, 36).

Much like in the later cases of “anti-…”, we find time and again the anticipated resurrection that suspends death even if it is under the pretext of rescuing the original or the question of reintroducing the real in artificiality to overcome its own end as real. Even from the strategy of the real, there is no “objective” difference between a theft and its simulation, even if law and order may be but a simulation — as Baudrillard notes that “The simulation of an offence will never be punished as a simulation” (Simulations, 38 and 40). In order to maintain the semblance of power, law and order must act as if the simulation of the act is the act itself. As the desert of the real, we may identify a failing real here, where law is masking and perverting basic reality and the simulation is marking the absence of basic reality — in other words, the simulation is “beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distinctions upon which function all power and the entire social” (Simulations, 40). But now whenever we try to turn back to the real, “it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real” (Simulations, 41).

Power without Power — In the Semblance of Power

In drawing a distinction between dissimulation and simulation, Baudrillard draws the following difference: “To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t” (Simulations, 5). One may now go ahead and take a step further in the face of the Trumpian repetition of Watergate in noting that we may not be able to tell the difference between dissimulation and simulation besides being able to formalize it — for example, in the case of the capitalist political realism that anon spouses, they clearly think they have a hold on political reality; that as an adult in the White House they are grounding it, even though it is void. Even though this is a repetition of the Waterdale scandal effect enabling the simulation of a political realism, the political realism of capitalist democracy continues to suppose its necessity despite any inconsistencies to the contrary in its contingency. Is this not what the internet teaches us when just about anyone can call you a “cuck” in complete casual irreverence? Is this contingent ungraceful aspect of digital modernity what anon tries to reassure us of by being an adult in the White House, where Donald Trump may as well be that person calling you a “cuck” on the internet?

As Baudrillard notes: “Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance” (Simulations, 45). For instance, when reading The New York Times piece that wacky member of the White House Administration wrote, it was not a powerful piece — at best it was trying to seem as if it were powerful, as it actually did something and made an impact. For instance, we may note its reference to Senator John McCain, which the author paints as an exemplar and powerful figure — “a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue” (anon). This is prefaced by the fact that he is dead — in other words, we do not have powerful speech ourselves, but at least we have an example of it. It rests also to say that it is a curious thing the exemplar and powerful figure comes in the form of John McCain, who besides the contingencies that paint him as such, he was questionably such a figure.

In the empty gesture trying to restore political normality and reality, anon writes to the opposite effect — the piece continues to be merely symptomatic of the derealization of the principle of political reality that the author seeks to preserve. However, with equal irreverence to the author of the piece as well as to the idealized figure of John McCain, we may argue that both of them only have the semblance of power — power without power, the soylent of politics. Their proper names are not enough to evoke power, for though they may think they have any, they do not — as any internet shitstorm may very well inform them.

In this case, we may elaborate on the current state of power as power without power by turning to some comments made by another philosopher, Byung-Chul Han. Han points out that there is absent center of the gravity in shitstorms — this comes with the circumstance of internet anonymity, the lack of bearing a name to tie any trust, respect, or recognition (In The Swarm, 2). The lack of proper name is what shitstorms gravitate around through an immediate affective discharge through the destruction and irreverence of names. The discharge comes with the excessive noise and saturation of the digital world — “The shitstorm is communicative noise” (In the Swarm, 4). In the midst of the internet swarm, anon is struggling with reassuring us with the properness of proper names such American Capitalist Democracy or John McCain — even though, demonstrably by any one internet comments section, the power of the name is eroding, that the Sovereign emperor is naked under all decor. Anon has only added into the swarming noise of the internet. Yet, for Han, silence in powerful speech offers a room for Sovereign action, as it makes the digital swarm fall silent such that it gains respect, trust, and opens up recognition insofar as the proper name offers a directive future opposed to immediate affective discharges — for as Han notes, “Outrage lacks the mass — the gravitation — that is necessary for action. It generates no future” (In The Swarm, 8). Insofar as this anonymous author is concerned, they are only giving us the semblance of power, not power itself — they cannot open up the space that powerful Sovereign speech creates by bringing the swarm to silence. Ostensibly speaking, there is no power in the White House, only its simulation and semblance of a fragile broken down political realism — and even more preoccupying over this semblance of power is that it offers no future

In the face of the vertigo of interpretation and irreverence of shitstorms, Han highlights “Information fatigue syndrome (IFS)” where we find manifest symptomatic complains “the progressive weakening of their analytic capacity, attention deficits, general unease, and the inability to bear responsibility” (In The Swarm, 60). In the case of the weakening of analytic capacities that characterize thinking, “Information overflow weakens thought” as thinking requires negative determinant judgments such as “discernment, discrimination, and selection” (In The Swarm, 60). Forgetting and omission are then opposed to the eternal-present of the internet. Even the eternal-present of the obscenely omniscient dissemination of information is such that its cumulative processes deform information. Or in the case of the inability to bear responsibility, we see a loss of bindingness and obligation, and we are seeing a rise in ”nonbindingness, arbitrariness, and short term” (In The Swarm, 61).

The promise of the future as a space for freedom degrades into the all-present, which “destroys actions that give time, such as taking responsibility and making promises” (In The Swarm, 61). It is for no other reason that the state of neoliberalism is characterized by Han as the erosion of the other into narcissism and the inferno of the same — digitality has come with the avoidance of the real, avoiding direct contact, bodiless, faceless. This in turn comes with the erosion of the model of power in Foucault’s panopticon, as both Baudrillard and Han point out. Han specifically notes that the disciplinary society would mould and shape subjects into a normative structure (characterized by shoulds), the neoliberal regime thrives on friendliness and the feeling of freedom (characterized by can and permissiveness) (The Agony of Eros: 9). In the development of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, we see a shift in the mode of production from liberalism and neoliberalism characterized by narcissism — what Baudrillard referred to as the “as if you were there” is now the common virtual reality, the star of the show is indeed you because you can so you will (Simulations, 50). For instance, in the expanse of digital media, “[Digitality] dismantles the real and totalizes the imaginary… it erases negativity in all its forms” and where “the gaze is the other within the image” and “The gaze of the other offers resistance to the eye which feasts on the image… the mounting narcissification of perception is making the gaze, the other, disappear” (In The Swarm, 22 and 24). And the key is indeed perception, for in social media engagements we see this in the semblance of power over the content of the internet, that it supposes that “now you are in control!” despite this control being limited to a play of mirrors and appearances. Here we find “The abolition of the specular and the society of the spectacle” where the real is nothing but a spectacle and it cannot be extracted from such (Simulations, 54). — in this sense, the self diffuses into the internet, as Han’s achievement subject which produces only itself as monument for transactions in the eternal presentations of Facebook Timelines.

We may consider in this instance how the show The Office (yeah, the American one specifically) tries to make us think about the work scenario besides the work-real. In short, Baudrillard notes “the scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production-real, has disappeared” (Simulations, 47). Any one episode of The Office suffices — yeah, they may work on occasion selling paper and whatnot, but we are shown these people mostly hardly working in such a way that it devices a charming narrative about work. It takes on experiences like the overbearing manager and turns them into the offensive but harmless Michael Scott, who throughout of the series continues to be enveloped by the awkward charm characterizing of the series’ comedy style. But by the time the series ends, this theme we explicitly see takes the center of the show as it is summed as:

I thought it was weird when you picked us to make a documentary. But all in all I think an ordinary paper company like Dunder Mifflin was a great subject for a documentary. There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point? (Finale, Season 9 Episode 23)

The charm of The Office and the work scenario takes on from restoring the notion of ordinary things, that is really the way things as if they were like that to begin with. And just the same as the question is not work itself but the scenario of it, in the anonymous piece we have been concerned with pertains not power, but merely the scenario of power (Simulations, 48).

In Conclusion: Democracy without Democracy and Nathan For You

By turning to the Comedy Central show, Nathan for You, I hope to wrap our discussion of Jean Baudrillard in the current context of the fragile state of power in the United States. The general question we are now working with is that one we considered before: How can we cure ourselves from simulated symptoms as in the case of hypochondria where one cannot tell a difference between an organic symptom and the psychosomatic? Though this question may remain open, this is nevertheless what Nathan for You’s Nathan Fielder reminds us of — his show is generally premised under the semblance of it being a reality T.V. show that seeks to help struggling businesses and owners only to reveal itself as more than just that. We may take two examples: the first would be Fielder’s viral “Dumb Starbucks” where in order to draw attention to a local coffee shop, The Helio Cafe, Fielder plays on a loophole to co-opt the aesthetic and business of Starbucks by just adding “Dumb” at the beginning — people surely jumped right along all the way into the virality as it progressively got shrouded in rumours such as Dumb Starbucks being the product of Banksy, until Nathan revealed that it was all a show in a news conference. The other case would be that of “The Movement” where, in order to cut costs of a moving company, Fielder tries to rebrand it as a fitness club where the owner is getting paid rather than paying people for moving things, all under the semblance that it was not work. Fielder creates a fake person called Jack Garbarino that went through The Movement’s program — this turned into an extensive media campaign including a ghostwritten book and multiple television interviews to simulate a sense of reality to the whole thing. Much like “Dumb Starbucks”, “The Movement” also broke in virality by being picked up by various T.V. stations and news outlets covering the simulation — the real world is duped by this excess information and simulation from which the real cannot even be subtracted; all those people featured in the show are clueless as to what the real of Nathan for You is. The viral effect of both “Dumb Starbucks” and “The Movement” is that they not only dupe the individuals involved in these things but also the information shrouding them at a local and national level in superficial sincerity.

One particular story in Nathan for You reveals the mechanisms behind the simulation of a story Nathan Fielder told in Jimmy Kimmel Live! Six months prior to the release of the episode “The Interview”, Fielder was featured as a guest for Kimmel’s show where Fielder recounted a story where he mixed up luggage with someone at the airport, where he was left with an oversized suit, where he was stopped by the cops only to find a bag of white powder in the suit, only to reveal that the powder was the suit’s owners mother’s ashes. The story was one of those classic interview stories that guests would tell on shows of the sort — and when Fielder released his episode about it, he revealed how he simulated the entire story and crafted it based on the recurrent narratives of people in these interview shows. This was particularly amusing when the preceding guest, Kirsten Dunst, told a story pretty much identical to Fielder’s.

Nathan Fielder becomes immediately relevant to the question of the simulation of political realism when we consider his YouTube video “Can the Emmys be Hacked?” — taking on the prop of the recent collusion of the American elections and electoral hacking, with an air of superficial playfulness, Fielder invited Carsten Schürmann an Associate Professor IT University of Copenhagen to discuss whether this can happen to the Emmys. Schürmann is known for having hacked the Virginia electoral system in under 90 minutes, and then proceeds to demonstrate how easy and unnoticeable would hacking the Emmys be to the unsuspecting eye. Schürmann goes ahead and notes that the system protecting the Emmys is not much different than that of the Alaskan electoral system for out-of-state residents — in simulating a real voting website, the fake passed as if it were the real thing.

Nathan Fielder is in all playfulness more powerful than whoever was anon, because Fielder is at least able to bend reality by a deliberate play of semblances. While anon tries to restore the political realism and legitimacy of American capitalist democracy, Fielder is able to show the entire superficiality and farce of it all.

References and Citations

Anonymous. “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” in The New York Times. September 5th 2018. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html?action=click&module=Trending&pgtype=Article&region=Footer&contentCollection=Trending

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. United States of America: Semiotext(e), 1983. Print

“Finale.” The Office. NBC. U.S.A. 16 May 2013. Television.

Full Fat Videos. “The Un-Reality of Nathan For You | Video Essay” in Youtube. Published on 18 May 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-67hbucUjQ

Han, Byung-Chul. In The Swarm: Digital Prospects. Trans. Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Print.

— — — The Agony of Eros. Trans. Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Print.

Kaepernick, Collin. Twitter, September 5th 2018. Online: https://twitter.com/Kaepernick7/status/1037387722107830272

Nathan for You. Comedy Central. U.S.A. 2013 — present. Television.

Nathanfielder. “Can the Emmys be Hacked?” in Youtube. Published on 7 Jun 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs_eQQZEZRY

Nerdwriter1. “How Nathan Fielder Undresses People” in Youtube. Published on 29 Jun 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjwLFZNCjDA

Philosophy Tube. “Elon Musk” in YouTube. Published on 31 Aug 2018. https://youtu.be/5gnlhmaM-dM

Stein, Jeff. “Republicans don’t hold town halls anymore” in Vox. Online: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/27/15880904/republicans-town-hall-health-care